https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/06/03/a-growing-number-of-governments-hope-to-clone-americas-darpa

 Skip to content

  * Menu
  * Weekly edition
  * Search

Subscribe
Sign in

  * Featured

      + Coronavirus
      + The Biden presidency
      + Climate change
      + Race in America
      + Daily briefing
      + The World in 2021
      + 1843 magazine
  * Sections

      + The world this week
      + Leaders
      + Letters
      + Briefing
      + United States
      + The Americas
      + Asia
      + China
      + Middle East & Africa
      + Europe
      + Britain
      + International
      + Business
      + Finance & economics
      + Science & technology
      + Books & arts
      + Graphic detail
      + Obituary
      + Special reports
      + Technology Quarterly
      + Essay
      + By Invitation
      + Schools brief
      + The World If
      + Open Future
      + Prospero
      + The Economist Explains
  * More

      + Newsletters
      + Podcasts
      + Video
      + Subscriber events
      + iOS app
      + Android app
      + Executive courses

  * Manage my account
  * Sign out

Search
[                    ]
[20210529_stp505]

Inventing the future
A growing number of governments hope to clone America's DARPA

They will not succeed unless they adopt the spirit which motivates it

Science & technologyJun 5th 2021 edition
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Jun 3rd 2021

  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  

USING MESSENGER RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it
worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by
providing protection against infectious diseases and biological
weapons. So in 2013 America's Defence Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna
$25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses
later, Moderna's covid-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, 
GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal
computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA
can claim at least partial credit.

Listen to this story

Your browser does not support the <audio> element.

Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has
spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAs for homeland security,
intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one.
President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health
version, which will, the president vows, "end cancer as we know it".
His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate
change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one
civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-D)
and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan's
interpretation is called Moonshot R&D. In Britain a bill for an
Advanced Research and Invention Agency--often referred to as UK ARPA
--is making its way through Parliament.

An agency needs agency

As governments across the rich world begin, after a four-decade lull,
to spend more on research and development, the idea of an agency to
invent the future (and, in so doing, generate vast industries) is
alluring and, the success of DARPA suggests, no mere fantasy. In many
countries there is displeasure with the web of bureaucracy that
entangles funding systems, and hope that the DARPA model can provide
a way of getting around it. But as some have discovered, and others
soon will, copying DARPA requires more than just copying the name. It
also needs commitment to the principles which made the original
agency so successful--principles that are often uncomfortable for
politicians.

On paper, the approach is straightforward. Take enormous, reckless
gambles on things so beneficial that only a handful need work to make
the whole venture a success. As Arun Majumdar, founding director of 
ARPA-E, America's energy agency, puts it: "If every project is
succeeding, you're not trying hard enough." Current (unclassified) 
DARPA projects include mimicking insects' nervous systems in order to
reduce the computation required for artificial intelligence and
working out how to protect soldiers from the enemy's use of
genome-editing technologies.

The result is a mirror image of normal R&D agencies. Whereas most
focus on basic research, DARPA builds things. Whereas most use peer
review and carefully selected measurements of progress, DARPA strips
bureaucracy to the bones (the conversation in 1965 which led the
agency to give out $1m for the first cross-country computer network,
a forerunner to the internet, took just 15 minutes). All work is
contracted out. DARPA has a boss, a small number of office directors
and fewer than 100 programme managers, hired on fixed short-term
contracts, who act in a manner akin to venture capitalists, albeit
with the aim of generating specific outcomes rather than private
returns.

The first challenge for the new ARPAs is to secure the breathing
space required for such experimentation. SPRIN-D illustrates how
difficult this can be. The concept was approved by Germany's
cabinet--"and then the Federal Court of Auditors came along," sighs
Barbara Diehl, SPRIN-D's chief partnership officer. After the
auditors issued their recommendations, the agency lost its exemption
from standard public-sector procurement rules and pay scales,
restricting who it could hire and the sorts of risks it could take.
Existing government ministries exert influence through the agency's
board, stymying radicalism, says Ms Diehl. Dominic Cummings, a former
aide to Boris Johnson, Britain's prime minister, who demanded a
British agency as a condition of his employment, has said he is
concerned by the provisions for ministerial oversight in the
legislation creating it.

Without freedom from political interference, the risk-taking
instincts of those at the cutting edge are curbed. The administrative
and research directors of Germany's Cybersecurity Innovation Agency
recently quit, frustrated by political interference. In America the
homeland-security ARPA was established in 2002, but has been
hamstrung by power struggles in the department that gave it its name.
"It has never been allowed to make independent decisions, it has
never been allowed an independent budget," says an observer. There is
a debate about whether the Biden administration's health ARPA (ARPA-H
) ought to stand alone, or be part of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH). The latter would be less of a legislative challenge,
but may infringe its independence.

Progress report

DARPA's budget in 2020 was $3.6bn, equivalent to just 8% of the NIH
's. If all goes to plan, ARPA-H will be on a similar scale, but none
of the others receives such funding (ARPA-E got $425m last year,
roughly as much as one of DARPA's six offices). Since the model works
by making lots of bets in the hope that a few will come off, stingier
funding means fewer wagers, which reduces the chance of success and
thus of continued political support. This is especially true given
the difficulty of measuring progress. As a paper by Pierre Azoulay of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his colleagues
notes: "It is impossible to accurately measure the incidence of
one-in-a-thousand ideas, much less one-in-a-million ideas, on a
timescale relevant to political decision-making."

The new agencies must also work out how to get their innovations out
of the lab. There is a close relationship between DARPA and the
Department of Defence, which is a customer for its work. But other
agencies lack such a pipeline. Research by Anna Goldstein at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues finds that,
although new "cleantech" companies sponsored by ARPA-E produce more
patents than others, they are not more likely to raise venture
capital, be acquired by larger firms or list on public markets. So
far, at least, the agency's innovations have struggled to leap into
the real world.

When ARPA-E began in 2009 the hope was that venture capitalists would
pick up innovations emerging from it. They have proved reluctant.
Energy technologies take far longer to reach the market than venture
capital's favourite investment, software. ARPA-E has thus tweaked the
DARPA model to add a "tech-to-market" team, to guide projects through
the industrial jungle. Last year it began handing out grants to
promising previous award-winners seeking to grow. William Bonvillian,
a science-policy expert at MIT, suspects one missing ingredient is
simply time: "We created the internet in '69. It didn't scale up
until '91 or '92. So we've just got to get used to it taking a
while."

ARPA-H may face similar difficulties. It is based on the idea that
the NIH is too conservative, focusing on biology at a time when many
life-science breakthroughs happen where biology, chemistry and
computer science meet. Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya, of
Waterloo and Stanford universities respectively, provide supportive
evidence, finding that the NIH's funding of work building on new
advances has declined. ARPA-H's other goal, though, is to pump money
into treatments for rare diseases, eschewed by the private sector
because of limited moneymaking opportunities. As with ARPA-E, this
lack of commercial interest may make the transition from innovation
to the real world tricky.

Michael Stebbins, who was an official in Barack Obama's
administration, and is an advocate for ARPA-H, hopes that someone
from DARPA can be recruited to lead the new agency. Replicating DARPA
's freewheeling culture is such a challenging task that there have
been times when DARPA itself has failed. It went through a fallow
period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many feel its ambitions
have been trimmed back in recent decades--minimising failures, but
also successes.

The defence focus also has an inbuilt advantage. By failing to build
a terrible weapon, American leaders can reassure themselves that
their adversaries won't either. There is no such reassurance in
failing to cure cancer. But that has not been enough to dissuade
politicians in America, Britain, Germany and Japan. The lesson many
have learnt from DARPA is that mere difficulty is no reason to avoid
something. It may even be a reason to do it. #

Correction (June 5th): A previous version of this article said ARPA-E
awarded grants of up to $150,000. In fact there is no limit.

A version of this article was published online on May 30th 2021

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Cloning DARPA"

Reuse this contentThe Trust Project
The Economist Today

Hand-picked stories, in your inbox

A daily email with the best of our journalism

[                    ]Sign up

More from Science & technology

Mass extinctions
Some 19m years ago the world's sharks almost disappeared

[20210605_stp505]

Programmes by programs
Composing by computer

[20210605_stp002]

Forensic science
Testing alibis is not as straightforward as it seems

[20210605_stp504]

  * Subscribe
  * Group subscriptions
  * Reuse our content
  * Help and contact us

Keep updated

  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  
  *  

Published since September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest
between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid
ignorance obstructing our progress."

The Economist

  * About
  * Advertise
  * Press centre

The Economist Group

  * The Economist Group
  * The Economist Intelligence Unit
  * The Economist Events
  * The Economist Store
  * Careers
  * Which MBA?
  * GMAT Tutor
  * GRE Tutor
  * Executive Jobs
  * Executive Education Navigator
  * Executive Education

  * Terms of Use
  * Privacy
  * Cookie Policy
  * Manage Cookies
  * Accessibility
  * Modern Slavery Statement
  * Do Not Sell My Personal Information

Copyright (c) The Economist Newspaper Limited 2021. All rights
reserved.